Fed up with automatic updates on Windows 10? We’ve got some good news…

Windows 10’s automatic updates, and the lack of control over when they’re installed (at least in the consumer flavours of the OS) has been a major bugbear for many users, although it seems that Microsoft has finally decided to give folks the option to at least delay updates.

At the moment, it’s possible to do some basic scheduling of update times with Windows 10 Home, but your hand is forced to install these things more or less straightaway – immediate updates being Microsoft’s idea of helping to keep the operating system as secure as possible.

However, sometimes you just don’t want to install updates right away for whatever reason – particularly if you’ve read reports of them breaking things such as webcams, to give a recent-ish example – and according to Winaero, fortunately Microsoft is introducing the option to delay updates by just over a month.

This feature has been spotted in a leaked preview version of Windows 10 (build 14997 – in which the new ‘Game Mode’ was also discovered), under the advanced options section for update settings.

Pause for thought

In advanced options, there’s a new slider entitled Pause Updates, and when it’s turned on, updates can be temporarily put on ice for up to 35 days – although some critical security updates, such as Windows Defender definitions, will still be installed straightaway.

With this new system, at least if you find out about an update which could potentially cause some trouble with hardware on your system, you can wait a while and hope that Microsoft manages to push out a fix before you must install said update.

This feature should be arriving with the Creators Update in the spring of next year, although there’s no guarantee that it won’t be considerably altered (or indeed cut completely) before the final incarnation of the update turns up.

We can’t really see this one being dropped, though, as it would certainly be a popular addition to give back at least some measure of control to users when it comes to updates.

As we saw last month, Microsoft is also improving updates by streamlining them and making the big downloads much more compact.